490 { China’s Quest
frequently abrasive with foreigners, Qian had an emollient style, reminiscent,
perhaps, of Zhou Enlai. Qian’s equanimous personality served his harsher
boss well. Within two and a half years, the chief architect of 6-4, Li Peng,
would enjoy a public meeting with President Bush and visit a wide array of
European capitals.Turn to the Third World and China’s NeighborsConfronting the wave of condemnation and sanctions following 6-4, China’s
leaders calculated that they would find a more sympathetic reception among
the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the non-Western developing
countries of the Third World. Unfortunately for Beijing, the East European
communist regimes were collapsing just as Beijing began courting them.
Courtship of the Third World was more successful. Many of these countries
had themselves been subject to Western attitudes of moral superiority and
interference in their internal affairs. Many of them also embraced norms
of defensive sovereignty worked out at the UN General Assembly over the
preceding decades. CCP foreign policy advisors were well aware of the new
sovereignty norms elaborated by the “revolt of the non-West” over the pre-
vious decades, and calculated that arguments cast along these lines would
find a warm reception in many Third World capitals. These Chinese calcu-
lations were not wrong. China also confronted the possibility that Western
countries might seek to use the United Nations to condemn or punish China
over human rights. Support by Third World countries would be crucial in
preventing that. China had billed itself as a developing country member of
the Third World both during the last decade of the Mao era (in the Three
Worlds Theory) and under Deng Xiaoping. That identity had not disappeared
during the late 1980s, but had been somewhat superseded by the enthusiasm
of China’s youth and intellectuals for China to join the ranks of the liberal,
democratic countries. A deliberate turn back to the Third World would not
only rally international support for China in the face of Western ostracism,
but would reiterate for China’s youth and intelligentsia that “Western values”
were inappropriate for China.
In mid-1989 a Politburo directive declared “From now on, China will
put more effort on resuming and developing relations with old friends [e.g.,
Pakistan and North Korea] and Third World countries.”^9 A number of
high-profile missions quickly reached out to these countries. In July 1989,
Qian Qichen visited Botswana, Zimbabwe, Angola, Zambia, Mozambique,
and Lesotho, while Deputy Foreign Minister Yang Fuchang visited Senegal,
the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana. The leaders of Indonesia,
Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia visited Beijing. In March 1990, Jiang
Zemin visited North Korea. In May 1990, Yang Shangkun made the first tour